Author: Martin

Mailto Email Links do not open in Internet Explorer

Just a quick fix to a computer problem that I encountered in the last days on an old computer of a friend who was using Internet Explorer 6. Nothing happened when he clicked on mailto email links on websites and he did not know why this happened. Normally his email software should open allowing him to write an email to the address of the link.

He helped himself by copying the email address and pasting it into the email program manually. He asked me if I knew a way to make the mailto links work in Internet Explorer and I told him that I would take a look. He did not like my first suggestion to change the browser which meant that I had to take a closer look at the reasons.

I did find the solution at the Troubleshooting Windows website. The suggestion was to open the run box and enter “regsvr32 /i mshtml.dll” first and after hitting return “regsvr32 /i shdocvw.dll”. It magically worked thereafter without problems. Not sure if this is a general solution though.